The Schwarz-Milnor lemma for braids and area-preserving diffeomorphisms

We prove a number of new results on the large-scale geometry of the L^p-metrics on the group of area-preserving diffeomorphisms of each orientable surface. Our proofs use in a key way the Fulton-MacPherson type compactification of the configuration space of n points on the surface due to Axelrod-Singer and Kontsevich. This allows us to apply the Schwarz-Milnor lemma to configuration spaces, a natural approach which we carry out successfully for the first time. As sample results, we prove that all right-angled Artin groups admit quasi-isometric embeddings into the group of area-preserving diffeomorphisms endowed with the L^p-metric, and that all Gambaudo-Ghys quasi-morphisms on this metric group coming from the braid group on n strands are Lipschitz. This was conjectured to hold, yet proven only for small values of n and g, where g is the genus of the surface.